But the Elders of the Brotherhood chose to treat these utterances as a complete abandonment of their cause; and they wrote a fierce and taunting letter to Augusta, in which they accused him of first attempting to exercise Papal power over the Brotherhood, and then abandoning them in order to obtain his release. Even this injustice did not drive Augusta to abandon his convictions. When, two years later, he was again required to make submission to the Utraquists, he refused to admit that he had held any heretical doctrines; nor would he accept the Utraquistic view of the Sacraments; and, in 1563, he explicitly declared that he believed the teaching of the Brotherhood to be nearer to Holy Scripture than that of either the Lutherans or the Utraquists. But the release, which he would not obtain by concession, was shortly to be granted to him gratuitously. In the year following this declaration, Ferdinand felt that his end was approaching; and, as if seized with remorse for his injustice, he consented to set Augusta free, without any further conditions. A few months later the king died; and the accession of Maximilian produced a further change in the fortunes of Bohemia. XV. FROM THE DEATH OF FERDINAND I. TO THE BEGINNING OF THE REACTION UNDER RUDOLF II. (1564-1600.) In describing a struggle between two rival powers in a State, it is extremely difficult to give a correct impression of the exact balance of success on either side at a particular crisis in the controversy; and this difficulty is enormously increased when the struggle is concerned partly with the question of spiritual (and therefore mainly individual) liberty; and partly with the growth of those more material forms of centralisation which check constitutional freedom and local self-government. When we hear of Ferdinand yielding on his deathbed to the prisoner whom he had been trying for so many years to crush into obedience, we feel that the victory lies, in the main, with those spiritual forces which were working against ecclesiastical uniformity. Nor does the resistance of the Moravian Estates seem less important as a victory of constitutional freedom, than the firmness of Augusta as a security for spiritual independence. But the real importance of such episodes as these lies in the contrast which they offer to the main tendencies of Bohemian history during the sixteenth century; and the proof which they consequently give of the survival of forces which seem elsewhere to be crushed out. For centralisation was, after all, steadily growing in the dominions of Ferdinand; and national life, however it might struggle for existence, was being sapped by arbitrary power.